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The Colonel’s Bequest |
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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Roberta
Williams |
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Part of series: |
Laura
Bow Mysteries |
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Release: |
October 1989 |
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Main credits: |
Programming: Chris Hoyt, Chris Iden |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough:
Complete Playlist Parts
1-7 (422 mins.) |
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The Colonel’s Bequest holds a certain amount of nostalgic
value for me — the way I remember it, I think it must have been my very first
«unboxing» experience, way back in an era when second- and third-hand pirate
copies of videogames, transmitted through friends and colleagues, were still
the norm in faraway Soviet Russia. Back then, it all looked like a miracle —
an actual box! Colorful art on the
front and back! Serial numbers! Manual! A cleverly designed copy protection
system that comes with its own magnifying glass! And, of course, all those
carefully numbered and marked floppies — I think I still only had a 5-inch
drive at the time, so these funny little square 3.5-inch diskettes had to
just lie around for a while. Even if the game were to suck in all sorts of
terrible ways, I knew I had no goddamn right to dislike it. (Honestly, looking
at digital copies of all that memorabilia even today, I think that the
packaging was quite outstanding for its time, and can still serve as a good
example of how to serve your product to the customer). Fortunately,
the substance turned out to be quite on par with the packaging. Combining a
decent – and even somewhat disturbing – mystery plot with the atmosphere of
both a Gothic novel and the exuberance of the Roaring Twenties, The Colonel’s Bequest once again
expanded the borders and technical potential of the Sierraverse in ways that
few people thought possible in 1989; and although most of the veteran players
today prefer to gush about its sequel, The
Dagger Of Amon Ra, the original Laura Bow mystery as envisaged by Roberta
Williams continues to retain that exclusive bit of «silent-movie charm» that
is naturally lacking from the sequel. As
was already established with her King’s
Quest games, Roberta Williams was never as much a talented «video game
storyteller» as she was an awe-inspiring «video game mother figure». Her
games never featured much creative dialog (because she was never an
outstanding writer) or challenging, unpredictable plot twists (because she
was a traditionalist at the core, and seems to have always operated on a «far
wiser people than us have already invented all the good stories» basis). But
she had a great knack for transferring humanity’s accumulated artistic
baggage into the medium of video games, providing classic fairy tales with a
new kind of digital life, showing great love and admiration for the genre and
— this is going to be particularly important to us — never shying away from
their gruesome and gory elements. Thousands of mentally traumatized gamers
probably still remember all the jump scares they got from Evil Wizard Manannan
or that pesky cave troll in King’s
Quest IV... Gruesomeness
and gore was actually the way things started out with Sierra and Roberta
Williams way back in 1980, when they were releasing their very first
graphical adventure game — Mystery
House. Incidentally, thrillers and mysteries were the real love of
Roberta Williams, and even after Sierra struck gold with King’s Quest, leaving Roberta with the necessity to continue
upgrading that fairy-tale formula, her craving for detective stories never
subsided. Finally, after King’s Quest
IV gave the lady her biggest hit yet, she decided that the time had
finally come to diversify her line of production, and that implied going back
to the spirit of Mystery House and
fully upgrading it for the next generation of video gaming. The Colonel’s Bequest does indeed
share the premise of that game — the protagonist being locked up in a large
mansion with bodies piling up all around, an idea itself borrowed from the
concept of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little
Indians — but puts it in a much larger, multi-level context, where the
surrounding atmosphere matters just as much — actually, matters much more than — the mystery itself. As
far as I can tell, The Colonel’s
Bequest — as opposed to its sequel — is Roberta’s own brainchild in its
entirety, though, of course, she is not directly responsible for the game’s
beautiful visual art or excellent soundtrack. She would only assume such full
responsibility one more time (for King’s
Quest V), with all of her other games made either in collaboration with
other Sierra talents (Jane Jensen, Andy Hoyos, etc.) or being «Roberta
Williams» largely in name only (most of The
Dagger Of Amon Ra would actually be written by Josh Mandel). This makes The Colonel’s Bequest share all the
common flaws of a typical Roberta Williams game — such as the near-total lack
of humor (except for all the unintentional bits), a certain rigid
straightforwardness, relative absence of subtext, etc.; but all these
qualities were, amusingly, just as helpful in the early days of computer
gaming as they may seem detrimental today, because the «minimalism of
essence» as espoused by Roberta fits in very well with the «minimalism of
style» as determined by the improving, but still quite sparse technical
possibilities of the late Eighties / early Nineties. What
I’m trying to say is that Roberta Williams was really the perfect gamemaker
for the years of 1988-89, and these were
the years during which she delivered her two best games: King’s Quest IV and The
Colonel’s Bequest. And even though the fame and appeal of the latter
seems to have largely faded away with time — even when people nostalgically
mention Laura Bow, they usually do it with Josh Mandel’s The Dagger Of Amon Ra in mind — I think that this is more the
result of an unfortunate combination of circumstances than of the game’s
actual flaws. After all, unlike King’s
Quest IV, The Colonel’s Bequest
did not trigger a revolution in the gaming world (even if it did introduce
some unprecedentedly neat new features); for many players, it was just
another murder mystery game, of which there were already quite plenty on the
market. Well... maybe it was, yes. But it was definitely a murder mastery
game done in great style, and hopefully what I plan to write below will
remind us all that every once in a while, great style may happen to be even
more important than great substance. |
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Content evaluation |
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Plotline
That
said, at least the set-up is pretty decent for an old school adventure game.
The story takes place in the 1920s, with you playing as Laura Bow, a young
and, as befits the «Roaring» decade, independent-minded student at Tulane
University in New Orleans, who is invited by her friend, the dapper-flapper
Lillian Prune, to spend the weekend at her uncle’s old plantation house
somewhere down in the bayou — apparently, Colonel Henri Dijon, a grumbly old
veteran of the Spanish-American War, has called a large family gathering for
some unknown purpose, and Lillian is loth to take the long river journey on
her own. After arriving and acquainting themselves with the large crowd of
people — which includes not just the Colonel’s close relatives, but his
personal doctors, lawyers, and staff as well — Lillian and Laura soon learn
the real reason for the invitation: apparently, the Colonel has just written
up his will, in which he wishes to distribute all of his impressive wealth in
equal shares among everybody present (except for Laura, of course). This
immediately sets off a storm of bickering — apparently, none of the guests
are able to stay civil for long — and soon after dinner, as the guests retire
for the evening, somebody promptly begins bumping them off, one by one... This
is, of course, not so much a set-up for a proper story as it is for a board
game like Clue, and, try as I
might, it is hard to find anything even remotely special about the plot. The
stylistic combination of the «old world», represented by the slightly
dilapidated plantation mansion itself, the elderly characters such as the
Colonel and his sisters, the ancient ghosts in the cemetery, the antique
newspapers in the attic etc., and the «new world» of the 1920s, represented
by the younger guests and their habits and attitudes, works well enough, but
it’s more a matter of atmosphere than storyline, and will be discussed later.
The plot, however, mostly just gets busy trying to suck in every single
stockpile character feature from the classic pulp market. Characters include
the Creepy Lecherous Old Doctor; the Ruthless Cynical Lawyer; the Silent
British Butler; the Slutty French Maid; the Wise and Loyal Black Cook; the
Dumb And Beautiful Blonde Hollywood Actress; the Dashing, Egotistically Evil
Young Gambler With Moustache; the Drunken Old Widow Sister... have I
forgotten anybody? Oh yes, there’s also a parrot (who, naturally, talks and
can occasionally spill some useful beans), an old warhorse and an old dog —
all of whom can be suspects, too, from a certain angle, if you so desire. The
story, formally segmented into eight hour-long «Acts» that stretch out from
early evening into late night (you have to complete a certain set of four
«quarter-hour long» actions to trigger the next act) develops in a fairly
straightforward manner: Laura wanders around the mansion and the outside
grounds, interacting with the various guests for questioning and eavesdropping
on some of them for extra bits of their personal stories. At the beginning of
each new «Act», she can (and usually will, unless you really suck at
pathfinding) run into a fresh dead body of one of the guests — which will,
however, miraculously disappear as soon as she leaves the grounds, leaving
her unable to prove to anybody else out there that a new murder has just been
committed. This is just a crude artificial device, of course, planted by
Roberta to keep the game moving in accordance with the same pattern for all
the acts — otherwise, it’d require too much extra work on the characters’
reactions to the murders — unfortunately, it makes it rather hard to suspend
the proverbial disbelief, reminding you over and over again that this is just
a digital equivalent of a board game, rather than a true life simulation. Another
piece of bad news is that, for all of her alleged independence and
astuteness, Laura Bow is not much of a character herself — not in this game, at least. Regardless of how
many private conversations you have overheard, of how much evidence you have
gathered, of how many bodies you have located, you are essentially unable to
fit yourself into any of this story — other than getting killed, that is, if
you do something that you weren’t supposed to be doing (like... taking a
shower!). You cannot prevent any of the murders; you cannot properly warn any
of the guests; you cannot call the police or make anybody leave the
plantation island before dawn. All you can do is hop around, talk, pick up
objects that don’t make sense to anybody other than yourself (even if it’s a
blooded poker or an actual weapon), and wait for the next turn of events.
There is only one serious choice of action made available to you at the very
end — and you’d have to be very
dumb, or, actually, more like «maliciously curious», to take the Bad Ending
choice out there. All in all, when it comes to Roberta Williams’ famous list
of Intrepid Female Protagonists, Laura Bow loses to Princess Rosella hands
down. (Although it would take Adrienne Delaney from Phantasmagoria to fully complete the «Helpless Damsel Watches As
World Burns» trope). The
game’s dialogue somewhat inverts Woody Allen’s classic «the food is so
terrible, and such small portions!» joke by being, in fact, quite terrible,
but coming in VERY large portions for compensation. If you aim for a truly
thorough exploration of the game, you shall soon find yourself doing almost
nothing but talking to the various characters — particularly in the first two
or three acts, when most of them are still alive. You can ask or tell just about anybody about just
about anybody else, or anything
else, including the Colonel’s pets and each single item in the
ever-increasing inventory of your evidence — moreover, in an absolutely head-spinning
twist you can expect to get different
answers in each new act, which,
altogether, makes up for hundreds, if not thousands of lines of dialogue: the
hugest ever amount of text in a Sierra game up to that moment. The down side
is that approximately 90% of that dialogue is either completely useless, or
totally boring, or both (the most common case). E.g.: «Ask the Colonel about
the monocle» — ‘so it’s a monocle, what
do I care?’ (Act I), ‘leave me
alone with your monocle!’ (Act II), ‘I
don’t know anything about a monocle!’ (Act III), ‘stop pestering me about monocles, young lady!’ (Act IV), ‘monocles? we don’t need no stinking
monocles!’ (Act V). (I actually made all these up on the spot, but I
think I got the spirit largely right). Getting a useful clue from all this
talk is a needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing. And don’t even begin to hope
for anything humorous to come out of it — as we all know, Roberta Williams
simply does not have a sense of humor, period. I don’t think any single
character drops even a single joke throughout the entire game; it would take
Josh Mandel and The Dagger Of Amon Ra
to teach them Roaring Twenties’ people to actually talk funny. Although
pretty much each character has their own backstory and their own skeleton in
the closet (including the Plantation itself, which has its own mysteries
dating all the way back to the Civil War), they are all board game
clichés. Some have problems with alcohol, some with gambling, some
have secret or semi-secret romances or painful breakups going on, some are
victims of circumstances and some are schemers and predators... it’s all in
the line of duty. Everyone is just a cardboard figure, voicing predictable
issues and behaving in predictable patterns. The dirty doctor makes vain
passes at you, the nasty lawyer keeps on insulting you, the flirty French
maid gets it on with whoever she lays her eye upon, the silent English butler
keeps silent, and only the Loyal Black Cook feels lonely enough to regale you
with a few lengthy stories about the Plantation and its former and present
owners after you gain her trust (if
you get her trust — this is something you must work for), but even the Loyal
Black Cook, as expected, is a church-going Voodoo practitioner with a sixth
sense about things. Pretty
much the only character with a curious case of split personality is Laura’s
best friend Lillian, who starts out as a snarky, life-savvy flapper, but soon
emerges as an actually deeply psychologically disturbed victim of a childhood
trauma, with bipolar disorder just around the corner. Of course, she is not
given much space to evolve and thrill you as a character, but at least she is
somewhat memorable, unlike any other character in the game; I do remember the
original strange feeling I got upon watching her transform from a character
who felt fun to be around to a character who felt dangerous to be around, and
I guess this motive is something that holds a special meaning for Roberta as
well, as she would later continue to explore it with Phantasmagoria. All
in all, though, remember that if you do decide to boot up The Colonel’s Bequest, you’re not
really doing it for the story — if you want top-level murder mysteries and
detective romps in your adventure gaming, you’re much better off with the Nancy Drew or Tex Murphy series. The genius of Sierra On-Line in its Golden Age
rarely lay in the story plotting or dialog writing anyway, and the games that
were personally designed by Roberta Williams are probably the best evidence
of that. All that The Colonel’s Bequest
had going for itself in that respect back in 1989 was the hugeness and
monumentality — such a great lot of content compared to pretty much anything
that came before — and with time going on, this is obviously no longer a
relevant factor, what with so many games now having so much more action and
dialogue, and all of it a far higher quality. Let us take a look, then, at
some other aspects of the game to see what, if anything, actually continues
to make it worth the while of the Discerning Antiquarian. |
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Puzzles
We
should certainly admire Mrs. Williams for her noble effort to do something different, compared to Sierra’s
previous games. For one thing, The
Colonel’s Bequest completely dispenses with the classic point system — in
this game, you do not play for points, you play for information and evidence.
Unfortunately, nothing too good came out of the idea, because the essence
remained the same: the game still requires you to successfully complete a
large number of actions in order to achieve the best detective ranking at the
end — most of these actions are optional, and many can be easily missed, and
the only difference is that now the game does not explicitly let you know
when you have performed a useful task. (There’s a tiny encouraging beep
played whenever you pick up a piece of evidence, but you have to keep your
sound on all the time, and there are no such sounds when you do something
useful in a different way — for instance, ask one of the characters an
important question, or investigate a stationary, non-removable object). For
another thing, this is probably the first Sierra game which can be beat —
technically — by doing almost nothing.
A veteran speed-runner could technically complete the game in about 5-10
minutes; all you have to do is run around the mansion and the outside
grounds, stumble into certain NPCs or groups of NPCs, and trigger the
clock-advancing events, about 30 of them in total to cover the entire eight
«acts». You don’t need to discover
any bodies or secret locations, you can get away without picking a single
piece of evidence (other than take one key off one body at the very end), you
might not want to talk to any of the guests at all (and I wouldn’t blame you,
as most of them really have very little to say). And you can still nail the killer at the end, even
without knowing who exactly he has killed. The
only thing that will be different during the final reckoning is your status
on a little thermometer that can, theoretically, go all the way up from
«Barely Conscious» to «Super Sleuth». Both the lowest and the highest rankings are comparably difficult to achieve — to
be «Barely Conscious», you really have to go out of your way to not see anything out of the ordinary during
the night (like, actively avoid all the locations with dead bodies, which is
itself a logistic challenge), whereas the «Super Sleuth» ranking can be
achieved only if you successfully complete more than 95% or so of all the
tasks marked in your notebook, some of them related not just to the main
topic, but to various outside matters as well (e.g. «Person Wishing To End An
Affair», «People With Gambling Habits», etc.). As the game rarely gives you
any hints in the process, this is excruciatingly difficult to achieve without
a walkthrough or hint book, but that’s Sierra On-Line for you, nothing too
surprising here, other than the lack of intermediate satisfaction because of
the elimination of the point system. In
other words, beating the game in general is super-easy; beating it with the
highest possible rank is super-difficult, though there are maybe only two or
three challenges in all which I would consider completely unfair (for
instance, a couple of things that depend upon randomized scripts running
during your visits to secret rooms). Even so, The Colonel’s Bequest is not so much a «puzzle-solving» game as a
«disciplinary» game: you get most of your progress not from wrecking your
brain for complex solutions to specific problems, but simply from being as
meticulous and obsessive as possible. Discipline yourself to look at everything (not forgetting the
magnifying glass!), push, pull, open,
and tamper in various ways with everything that can be tampered with, talk to everybody, and you’re pretty
much set. There is, I think, only one multi-step puzzle that you have to
solve in order to discover the plantation’s ultimate historical secret, and
even that one hardly requires true creativity, just a lot of snooping around
to collect all the necessary paraphernalia. One
more innovative detail in the game was the addition of a bunch of post-game
hints, issued to you on account of everything you forgot or did not figure
out while playing. These are often quite vague and faint (e.g. "look for multiple rusty objects",
"murderers leave ‘tracks’, check
them closely!", etc.), but it’s still better than nothing — prior to
The Colonel’s Bequest, the only way
to get any hints from Sierra was to
give the company more money (by calling their service or buying a hint book).
The same technique was also borrowed by Al Lowe for the third game in the Larry series, on which he was working
at the same time, but I think that ultimately it did not stick, largely
because the only reason for a post-game hint series is to point out the
optional tasks that you might have missed, and as time went by, the number of
optional tasks with extra points in Sierra games grew progressively smaller
anyway. For this particular game,
however, where almost any task is
optional, the hints were quite essential, as they could at least point you in
some vaguely specific directions. In
any case, the puzzle system of The
Colonel’s Bequest is a classic case of Noble Intentions soiled and
neutered with Dumbass Execution. The single worst thing is the total
detachment of the game’s finale from the protagonist’s work over the eight
«Acts» — none of your choices and actions have any direct bearing on the
denouement, and any evidence that you may have collected is useless to the
plot (it only makes an impact on your final ranking). Ultimately, this makes
the game fail as a true «murder mystery challenge», in much the same way in
which it just failed as a potentially involving «story». Is there anything, then, that in any way
redeems it as a memorable playing experience?.. |
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Atmosphere As usual in Sierra games, when all else fails, atmosphere and
ambience come to the rescue. I would all but bet my life that nobody who’d
played The Colonel’s Bequest back
in its time remembers it specifically for its brilliant plot or inventively
designed puzzles — but that most people probably remember how their Laura Bow
ended up in the hungry jaws of a swamp alligator, or fell under the knife of
the murderer while trying to take a shower, in a totally and utterly
gratuitous and just as totally unforgettable stylistic nod to Psycho... «just because we can».
Or, maybe, not so tranquil after all, because the
second and even more pervasive part of the atmosphere is the Legend of the
South. Where games like Resident Evil
like to trap you inside creepy, danger-choked closed buildings, making you
yearn for the wide open spaces, The
Colonel’s Bequest does the opposite — it’s a game that promotes agora-
rather than claustrophobia, if you get my meaning. In theory, staying outside
the plantation house is not really as dangerous as staying inside it — the
murderer does not seem to be interested in getting to you in the open air,
and all you really have to do is avoid getting too close to the
alligator-infested swamp and river. But in practice, staying outside at
night, with all the eerie shadows thrown around from the Spanish moss on the
trees, with all the croaks and creeks of unseen living beings, with glowing
alligator eyes staring at you from nowhere, with thunder and lightning on the
horizon... wandering around this place is really like a cold shower right
after the warmth and coziness of the sunny spaces at Tulane. The inside of the plantation house, especially in
the first few acts while most of the people around you are still alive, is
where you really want to find yourself as quickly and as much as possible. I
remember this contrast vividly — one minute, you’re standing in the outside
darkness, with the wind howling and the frogs croaking and maybe a couple
hungry alligators snappin’ at your heels (it was all imagination, of course,
but the game did great at instilling fear inside your heart); the next
minute, you step inside the living room and there’s the dashing Gloria
Swansong (yes, with a hilariously brilliant final -g) sitting in her feathers and boas, listening to life-giving,
relaxing bits of ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ or ‘The Entertainer’ on the Victrola. No
other game at the time succeeded so well in making you run into the welcoming
hands of modern civilization from the vicious, terrifying maw of Mother
Nature. Of course, modern civilization had its own drawback:
a serial killer on the loose, who could crop up in the least expected places
— from the bathroom to an empty closet in the hall. The plantation house had
other ways to kill you as well — Laura could end her life buried under a
fallen chandelier, chopped in two by a rusty axe on an old suit of armor, or,
ironically, squashed to pulp under the weight of civilization’s latest
achievement, the electrically-powered elevator. Still, for some reason, the
plantation house was never nearly as creepy as the outside, and it was fun
exploring how modern life, in one way or another, was finding its way inside
something so decidedly mid-19th century. There are tons of fun artifacts,
from mechanical pianos playing rolls to Murphy beds to old-fashioned doll
houses to weapon collections; almost each room in the house has its own
special face, even if, unfortunately, there is only a very limited amount of
things you can do with them. (You can
close and open the Murphy bed, if you so wish, provided there isn’t a dead
body lying on it!). It is all these contrasts between the old and the
new, the safe and the dangerous, the creepy and the comfortable, that really
make the game worth playing and its universe worth visiting. The experience
is not particularly «realistic»: even in those of her games which are
supposed to take place in the «real» world, Roberta Williams is still far too
fascinated by Gothic novels and Hammer horror to make her environments and
her characters’ actions fully believable (this would reach a certain absurd
peak with Phantasmagoria half a
decade later), but does this really matter when you’re going for more of an emotional
punch than an intellectual appraisal? Particularly when that emotional punch
is more likely to be received by simply wandering from one game screen to
another, rather than by actually doing
something?.. |
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Technical features |
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Graphics
Already
the introduction was done in great style: a close-up of the Colonel’s will,
with his hand slowly tracing out the signature (Col. Henri A. Dijon), whereupon a bloody dagger pins it to the
table, and the dripping blood gradually transforms the game’s title from blue
to red. This kind of detailed cinematography was never before seen in a
Sierra game, and immediately created the feel that you’re about to witness,
and participate in, something truly special. Thereupon, the scene would
change to an introduction of all the NPCs ("Starring...") — who were seen both in their miniaturized
sprite forms and in animated
close-ups: an excellent device that immediately drew you in closer to the
«actors»; remember that up until then, Sierra was really skimpy on close-up graphic design for both the playable
and the non-playable characters. The
backgrounds were painted with two things in mind: detail and atmosphere. The
importance of the second parameter also becomes clear as early as the intro,
when the opening scene of Laura and Lillian meeting on the lovely greens of
the sunlit campus of Tulane University is immediately followed by the mix of
black, dark blue and deep green of the plantation island at night — giving
you just a quick opening glimpse of safety and comfort before landing you
fair and square into the gloom and danger of «non-civilized» America. The mix
of vague shapes and dark shadows as you move from one plantation screen to
another is often disconcerting and confusing, and it always looks as if one
of these shadows might materialize and grab you... and occasionally it does,
if the shadow in question is a hungry alligator. Detail, on the other hand, serves a more
pragmatic purpose, since you are expected to be hunting for evidence, and
evidence may be concealed just about anywhere. Unfortunately, about 90% of
the surrounding paraphernalia are just red herrings, but then again, isn’t
that just like it is in real life? Almost every single room in the mansion is
cluttered with stuff, and it’s usually lovingly depicted stuff: bookshelves
with colorful titles, mantlepieces with shiny exhibits of guns, richly
upholstered chairs, globes, vases, pots, toys, you name it — apparently, the
plantation’s previous owners were quite compulsive hoarders in their day.
Most of that stuff is depicted quite well, too, even such tiny bits as a
small derringer pistol in a glass case — I do not recall ever wasting time,
wrecking my brain on how to identify an object before trying to
"look" at it or pick it up. Most
importantly, The Colonel’s Bequest
featured far more animation than ever before in a Sierra game (the real
reason why the whole damn thing ran so slow). As you walk around the
plantation, froggies are jumping around, alligators move from land to water
and back again, and huge lightning flashes in the sky keep spooking you into
thinking they’re coming for you sooner or later. Inside the mansion, clocks
are ticking, lights are flickering, the parrot is getting impatient in its
cage, and the guests are busy talking, smoking, drinking, eating, reading, or
snoring in their beds; nobody ever
just stands still at their post. As a result, the world of The Colonel’s Bequest was far more
dynamic than, say, the world of Police
Quest II, even if the latter took place on a lonely island in the swamps
and the former in the supposedly hustlin’-and-bustlin’ Lytton City. The
best work of all, arguably, was done for the close-up portraits of the
characters and their animations. The actual sprites look about as ridiculous
today as they always did — there’s no escaping the sad graphic limitations —
but in close-up (and you are going to see a lot of close-ups if you’re good at sleuthing and discover all the
ways to spy on the different characters early on in the game), they are all
fully representative of their personalities: the gruff and grumpy Colonel,
the salacious and unpleasant Doctor, the arrogant Lawyer, the dashing
Hollywood actress, the sexy French maid, etc. There’s even some reflection of
character development in the close-ups — for instance, Lillian looks all
sweet and happy while chatting up people at first, then has her expression
change to all-out rage and anger in Act V during her sorting things out with
«Uncle Henri», when she learns that she is apparently not nearly as «special»
to him as she’d always thought. Of
course, all of these praises have to be taken with a grain of salt, as we’re
still talking graphic standards of 1989. But if I have any real complaints
about the game, they are certainly not going to be directed at the visuals —
which seem to have been produced with far more love and care than the actual
plot or dialog. The Colonel’s Bequest,
like almost any Roberta Williams game, is a triumph of atmosphere and style
over substance, and the game’s artists, Doug Herring and Gerald Moore, seem
to have invested much more personality into its characters than Roberta
herself. |
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Sound
Sound-wise, pretty much the entire game is built around the
alternation of «merry» and «sinister». The opening theme is a haunted-house
church organ dirge, after which the credits roll accompanied with a catchy,
danceable piece of woodwind-led MIDI vaudeville. Laura Bow at Tulane University
gets her invitation from Lillian to the sound of a lively foxtrot (or is that
the Charleston? I confess I’m really bad at my popular 1920s dances) — but
arrives at the Plantation Island immediately after to the sound of a grim
cemetery tune, symbolizing not so much the upcoming murders as the overall
air of death, desolation, and otherworldliness associated with her
destination. All of these mood shifts are quite vivid; the themes truly set
the mood rather than merely hint at it from a formal point of view. Unfortunately, there is not really a lot of music beyond the
introduction and ending sections; music that would constantly run in the
background, like it did in Leisure Suit
Larry III, for instance, would probably detract from the suspense — thus,
while wandering outside the Mansion, Laura’s journeys are only accompanied
with sound effects (whistling winds, thunder in the sky, croaking frogs,
hooting owls, splashing alligators, that sort of thing), which is still
creepy enough, I guess. Inside the house, most of the music actually comes
from music-playing sources — in the Billiard Room, for instance, Gloria
Swansong will ceaselessly spin her Victrola tunes, which are either borrowed
by Ken from 1920s’ dances or composed by him in the appropriate styles;
Laura, meanwhile, can wind up the mechanical piano and play a bunch of nice,
brief arrangements of Scott Joplin ragtime pieces (‘Maple Leaf Rag’ goes off
real great!). In addition, the French maid Fifi seems to have really cool
musical taste, with a nice stock of classical records such as Satie’s
‘Gymnopédie No. 1’ and Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, adding a whole extra
dimension to her stereotypical sex doll personality. Every
now and then, there is also a musical joke or outside reference included —
for instance, the shower murder scene almost obligatorily alludes to the
strings of Psycho (just like the
shark theme in King’s Quest IV had to be borrowed from Jaws), and the ‘Drunk Ethel’ theme
playfully and painfully distorts, contorts, and mutilates the melody of one of
the game’s other themes... for no other reason than to slightly brighten up
your night when you’ve just narrowly missed being eaten alive by an
alligator, and need to be reminded of the fun side of life which involves
drunken old ladies fearlessly roaming on the premises (no alligator would
probably touch one of those). In
short, despite the laconic nature of the soundtrack (everything put together,
including the rags and Satie, occupies about 40 minutes at maximum), it is
extremely vital to the game — and it actually sounds not half-bad even with
an old PC Speaker (which is the way I first heard it, having no sound cards
or Roland synthesizers)! I also think this was the first time in Sierra
history when the soundtrack included so many different MIDI rearrangements of
classic musical pieces, in addition to original composing — it sure helped
that most of them were already in the public domain by 1989. |
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Although, in general, the gameplay system in The Colonel’s Bequest was typical of
most of Sierra’s second-generation golden-age titles, the stylistic and
substantial changes introduced by Roberta all but required things to be at
least slightly different in terms
of the accompanying interface as well. In fact, things are quite noticeably
not what they used to be right at the start of the game — featuring what is
probably the single most original «copyright check» device in Sierra’s
history, so elegant, in fact, that it is the only copyright protection
mechanism I find myself occasionally enjoying.
Even before the title screen, you are asked to identify a fingerprint
belonging to one of the game’s characters (each guest has two different ones)
which you have to look up in the accompanying copy protection sheet that came
with the box — except that sheets like that could be xeroxed, so they are
cleverly masked on the sheet so that you can only really see them with the
aid of a special red-lens magnifying glass. (Naturally, since there were only
12 characters, you could theoretically take your time and reach the correct
answer through a lengthy series of trials — with the initial chance of
success being 1 in 24, that would not be such a tough job — but then again, I
doubt people could be that patient even back in 1989). This is original, elegant, classy, and, in a way, constitutes
the most actual detective work you shall be doing throughout the game — and
not much of a determent, since sooner or later you shall begin to memorize
those nifty little prints anyway. It also prepares you to realize that this is
going to be a somewhat different
experience, and, indeed, quirky little changes from the usual style of King’s Quest or Space Quest quickly follow. For one thing, since the points
system has been eliminated, the overhead menu bar is typically hidden; it can
be easily accessed by pressing a key, but generally, the bar never obstructs
your sight, contributing to the «cinematic» experience. For another, the
usual style of «black text inside a simple white box» has been replaced here
with «white text inside an ornamental black box», giving the game both a bit
of Art Deco flavor and a murder
mystery one. (Unfortunately, they couldn’t do this with the pulled-up menu
itself). The game’s parser shares the usual flaws and benefits of a
Sierra parser, recognizing quite a few commands and objects but certainly not
enough to be fully adequate to the amount of detail in the pictures. The good
news is that there are shortcuts: interaction with other NPCs is made easier
by allowing you to press key combinations to «Ask about...», «Tell about...»,
«Show...», and «Give...» (you only need to type in the object of your inquiry
or transaction; the addressee will be automatically determined by the game
based on your relative positioning on the screen). «Look at...» is also a
shortcut, but, unfortunately, there is no specific «look at... with the
magnifying glass» shortcut, which really drags after you actually get the magnifying glass and have to
type that in repeatedly (yes, sometimes it is actually necessary). True to its detective story mission, the game has no action or
arcade sequences whatsoever, the most «action» thing about it being the need
to watch your step, particularly on the outskirts of the plantation where
deadly bogs and hungry alligators await, and an occasional timed sequence or
two, where you have to take a quick decision in order to influence the story
or get a higher ranking. This can certainly lead to a point where you simply
get tired of spending most of your time «asking» or «telling» other people —
but at least with people dropping dead around you at a steady pace, by the
time the last acts roll around, there is hardly anybody left to ask (and the
few people around you who are still
alive typically get grumblier all the time and eventually just refuse to answer
any more questions — what a relief!). As I already mentioned above, the one bad thing about
eliminating the points system is that you are never properly informed of your
overall progress, except for the major events that advance time 15 minutes
forward. Sometimes it is fairly obvious that you have progressed, for
instance, when you pick up an object or notice something unusual about it
through close scrutiny; at other times, it is much less so, e.g. when you
finally accidentally ask somebody an important question or spy upon a meaningful
conversation (some conversations are there only for decorum, and some
actually reveal significant information, and it is not always evident which
is which). I can understand Roberta’s disdain for the classic points system —
when people play for points, they tend to turn the entire experience into a
mechanical hunt-for-achievement algorithm — but couldn’t she have at least
introduced, I dunno, a flashing lightbulb or something each time you make
another tiny step on your long and winding road to «Super Sleuth»? And those
«hints» at the end really do not help all that much. Still,
with everything pooled together, Roberta does achieve her goal which she
proudly states in the «About...» section of the menu: "The Colonel’s Bequest" is different
than the so-called "normal" adventure game as it was designed
around a story and characters rather than a series of puzzles..."
Like these changes or not, the game was an interesting experiment in
broadening and tweaking Sierra’s standard formula, and while not every such
experiment did work in Sierra’s history (here’s looking at you again, Codename Iceman!), the tweaks
introduced to The Colonel’s Bequest
mostly worked. At the very least, the new interface certainly contributes to
the overall atmosphere — and, as I said, this game is all about atmosphere. |
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As is so usual with Sierra, anybody who begins and ends their
judgement of The Colonel’s Bequest by asking the question «just how
good is this game as a game?», will almost inevitably descend into a
plethora of complaints (many of which, though probably far from all, have
been tackled above) and even more inevitably start bringing up LucasArts or,
in this case, some classic Tex Murphy game or The Last Express
to back up the case of what a true murder mystery videogame may and should
look like. As a game, The Colonel’s Bequest was not
particularly good when it came out and it certainly has not improved with
age. But as a multi-media experience in which the total sum is
expected to be greater than the parts, The Colonel’s Bequest was an
inventive, inspired, and technologically creative application of the classic
Sierra formula. In fact, its principal flaw was not so much the lack of
serious puzzles or the stupid plot or the boring dialog, but rather the
emphasis its advertising campaign took on how it was all about you, the
player, being supposed to practice your logic skills in a game of wit — when,
in reality, the most wit one has to exercize here is on figuring out what to
do with that strange red magnifying glass in your box. Now if only the game had advertised itself for what it really was — a
trip to a slightly surrealistically-warped dimension in which you, the
player, made characters from the 1920s bump into and clash with memories from
the 1860s, with just a touch of Edgar Allan Poe from a more distant past and
Alfred Hitchcock from a more distant future sprayed around the edges — its overall
reputation might have securely solidified by now. The underlying cultural and
moral implications to this «clash» are simple enough — the present held in
the iron grip of the past; the greed, stupidity, and vanity of the modern age
next to the eternity of nature and the briefness of human life in comparison;
the «honored tombstones» silently looking down on their dishonorable
descendants, etc. — but the atmosphere of the game really makes them work.
And although it is true that in most respects, The Dagger Of Amon Ra
would put The Colonel’s Bequest on its knees (once the franchise
essentially migrated from Roberta’s lap under the wing of Josh Mandel), the
second game in the series could never even begin to be described with the
term ‘haunting’ — which I seriously considered employing at the
beginning of this review. But then I thought it a little too tasteless. (So I
found this way to stick it at the end instead!) Of course, given the sheer number of positive retrospective reviews
and the typically warm welcome that Colonel’s Bequest-related videos
seem to receive on YouTube nowadays, it can be stated with relative safety
that the game is not completely going away any time soon — and that its art
style, soundtrack, atmosphere, and (not the least) educational value are
still capable of attracting attention and providing inspiration, maybe even
from some people born in the 21st century. There are even some indie-style tribute
projects floating around (e.g. Julia Minamata’s ongoing Crimson Diamond
project), and there have been attempts to revive the game by remaking it in 3D
(abandoned, I believe) — which would be a mistake, I think, since I honestly
do not believe that The Colonel’s Bequest would ever work that well in
a modernized version; to do that, you’d have to vivisect its childlike soul,
and that would make it into something completely different, for better or
worse. Instead, let’s just make sure it continues to be available and to haunt
us people of the 2020s with its 1980s vision of a 1920s future ruined by the
ghosts of the 1860s... |
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